


Civil Defense

by 2ndA



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-15
Updated: 2010-05-15
Packaged: 2018-05-19 08:48:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5961316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2ndA/pseuds/2ndA
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written years ago for an apocalyptothon prompt: "Nuclear attack - who are the people who get in the bunker? Who's on Air<br/>Force one? How do they begin to rebuild? Characters I'm most interested in are CJ, Toby, Andy (if you include her), Sam, Ainsley, Jed, Abbey";<br/>epigraph is W.S. Merwin</p>
            </blockquote>





	Civil Defense

 

 

 

_On the last day of the world/  
I would want to plant a tree_.

TEN

“You should offer to take me to lunch.”

“What?!” CJ looks up from her desk to find Danny Concannon making faces at the goldfish in the bowl on her desk.

“It’s the first Saturday of the new year.  Your boss is in New Hampshire; my editor is still sleeping off her hangover; we’re both at work.  So, I think, to demonstrate collegiality and as an indication of the high regard in which you hold me, as a member of the press—you should take me to lunch.”

“Lunch?!  It’s…” CJ glances at the talking heads on the TV in the corner: a CNN morning show, “not even 9:00 in the morning, Danny.  So, even if I were going to take you to lunch—which, let’s be clear on this, I’m _not_ —it would be a little early.”  She returns her attention to the files Carol left out for her.  “How about, to demonstrate collegiality and…that other thing you said…you go away so I can do some work?”

“OK,” Danny says, agreeably, and goes back to making faces at Gail, whose fishbowl has been decorated with both a Christmas tree and a menorah.  For about thirty seconds, there’s just the muted sound of a CNN Special Report.  Out in the bullpen, Carol’s phone rings.

“Anyway, how come _I’m_ supposed to invite _you_ to lunch?  You’re the one with the expense account.”

“Would you have lunch with me?”

“Danny! I can’t let members of the press corps buy me lunch!”

“See, that’s why I don’t offer!  Now, I have no such ethical compunctions, if _you_ were to invite _me…_ ”

CJ’s beeper goes off in the depths of her bag, interrupting Danny’s argument.  A second later, his cellphone starts playing _8675309_.

“Seriously?”  CJ asks, excavating a ring of keys, a fistful of receipts, two tubes of lip gloss, and some spare change before getting to the beeper, “ _that_ ’s your ringtone?”  From under the pile of receipts, her desk phone rings.  Danny’s cell is still chirping away happily.

CJ squints at the beeper…where are her glasses?  “Are you going to ans…”  There is a tremendous crash from down the hallway, like a thousand china dishes falling from a great height.  Suddenly, the early January sunlight pouring through the window behind her grows impossibly bright, so bright that CJ has to close her eyes, even though she is sitting with her back to the window.

When she opens them, she is still sunblinded, blooms of light dancing across her vision. With a muffled grinding sound, the back-up generator kicks in; the dim emergency lights cast strange shadows.  Gradually, CJ realizes that, of four television sets that line the east wall, one of them is blank and two are broadcasting a snowstorm of static.  Only CNN still has a picture; later she will learn that their projection satellites happen to be further west than those of their competitors and are the last to be disrupted.  She can’t see the full picture, though, because Danny has stepped in front of it, close enough that the pixels are turning his face red and blue, his fingers pressed to text scrolling along the bottom of the screen as though it is Braille.

“What…?”

“Baltimore,”  Danny starts, but the words stick in his throat.  “Baltimore,” he tries again, “is gone.”

 

NINE

Sam goes home for Christmas, taking the red-eye out of Dulles on the 23rd and flying for eight hours with a stopover in Denver because he is that rarest of American species, a native Californian.  The holiday is full of awkward moments.  He celebrated by squiring his mother to a pseudo-WASP Christmas dinner at the country club, where the Mexican immigrant on the housekeeping staff are dressed like English carolers.  There’s a Boxing Day lunch at his aunt’s house, only marginally less formal; his cousins compare time-shares in Florida, he uses a coffee stirrer to pin ice cubes down in his drink until they drown.  He meets his father for drinks—Scotch, and too much of it—at the fusty steakhouse the old man’s  favored since he was a young property lawyer.  They talk about the weather and the rising sub-prime market;  they do _not_ talk about politics, or the Other Woman.  He escapes on December 30 th, pleading work; no one else needs to know that the President will stay in New Hampshire through the new year.   He makes it back to his apartment in Northeast at 2:30 AM on the last day of the year, tips the cab-driver exorbitantly, and falls asleep in his clothes.  
  
Six hours later, he wakes up when the shockwaves blow out every window in his apartment.

Squalls of biting January wind whip through the empty casements, spraying grit and shards of glass.  Something smashes against the back of Sam’s head and, by the time he stumbles to the bathroom, dazed and breathless, his forearms are scraped and stinging from shielding his face.  Still half-asleep, he clambers into the bathtub in the apartment’s only windowless room, because he’s from California and that’s what you do in an earthquake.  This is not an earthquake, though.  To be sure, the whole building had given a single, shuddering _heave_ —enough to toss him out of bed; he’d woken up on the floor—but there had been no preliminary tremors and there were no aftershocks.  Now everything is still. Far away, he can hear the sound of car alarms; a transformer snaps. There is a distant, muffled roar, like a gas explosion miles away. Every now and then, something somewhere tumbles and smashes.  When these sounds become louder than the thundering of his own heartbeat, he clambers out of the tub and opens the door to the living room.  
  
Part of Sam’s mind—the detached, precise, legal part—supplies the science: the fireball created by a massively powerful explosion recruits oxygen from miles around, gale-force winds gusting in to fill the vacuum, scouring any space available to it. Another part—his internal speechwriter, always seeking the right metaphor—pictures an invisible hand from the northeastern sky turning apartment inside out like a sock. The table and chairs that had once stood in front of the window have vanished, like the window itself; the sofa had been dragged eight feet across the room. The bookcases have been plucked clean, every drawer pulled out of the kitchen island, every lamp and picture stripped from the walls. The telephone has been yanked out of the wall; now it hangs from the ceiling, the cord tangled from the smashed light fixture. He reaches out to touch the dangling receiver, sets it swinging like a pendulum.  
  
The telephone reminds him…Sam is almost surprised to find his cellphone is still in his pocket.  Holding it tightly, like a talisman from a safer world, he edges closer to the frame of what used to be the French doors.  Shreds of paper and fabric eddy around his feet and, though he only lives on the third floor, he cannot bring himself to get too close.  He sees snapped tree limbs, a plume of smoke blowing from somewhere in the neighborhood.  His building is U-shaped, surrounding a small courtyard; through the early morning light, he can see another person on the opposite side, standing in his or her living room, a tiny silhouette against the white interior walls that are now plainly visible. The person— _my neighbor,_ Sam thinks to himself—lifts a hand.  Mutely, Sam waves back.

Josh had once shown him how to program last names into his phone, but Sam has never been good with gadgets and he ended up erasing his entire contacts list.  Since then, he’s been content to just type in names and let the phone organize them alphabetically.  And so, when he flips open the phone, the first name on his contact list is _Ainsley Hayes_.

 

EIGHT

The day continues, but the sun doesn’t ever rise.  At ten o’clock, at noon, the sky still keeps the dim silvery light of an overcast January morning.  If anything, it gets _darker._ Toby is in a good position to observe this, because he abandons his car at a half past nine and starts walking.   Washington, DC, was built well before the automobile; twentieth century updates have put memorials and museums before traffic flow.   It’s a city designed for parades and processions, not for mass evacuations.  It takes Toby thirty minutes to drive four blocks through the panicked crush of cars, trucks, bicycles.  Some people are fleeing with their possessions in backpacks, baby carriages, shopping carts; others are trying frantically to get home; many are simply wandering, hysterical, bewildered.  At the corner of M and 32nd street, he pulls into an alley behind a Starbucks.  Normally, it would be packed with Georgetown yuppies.  Today, no one has even bothered looting it. He parks and finds himself standing still in the middle of the exodus, looking up at the gray sky, trying to get his bearings by the non-existent sun.

“Jesus, get out of the fucking way!” Someone barrels past him, nearly knocking him over with a shopping cart piled with clothes and canned goods.

Toby blinks, aware again of the honking, shouting, crying.  He grew up in New York City—he doesn’t know how to navigate by the sun.  He does, after twenty years as a professional political operative, know that M street runs north/south. He points himself north, and starts walking toward the Maryland suburbs. He leaves his keys in the ignition.

 

SEVEN

When senior-level staffers work on the weekends, they sign in at the Northwest Lobby guard desk.  There are electronically coded keycards in the West Wing, and digital cameras and face recognition software and security officers who run alongside moving cars, yet folks sign in on photocopied form using the Bic that is tied to the clipboard with a ratty gray string.  The disparity has never bothered CJ; it’s just one of those quirky traditions (why does touching the bust of Lincoln in the Cabinet Room bring you luck during close House votes?  why is the corridor by the Roosevelt Room called the wailing wall?).  She barely even thinks about it until the day a nuclear bomb takes out Baltimore.  She and Danny are still staring, unseeing, at the TV test pattern when Morris, the weekend guard, shows up at the door, with Donna trailing behind him.  He knows where they are, knows that she hauled her ass out of bed on this bright January Saturday, because she wrote _Cregg Press Rm/Office 8:07 AM_ on the sign-in sheet when she entered the building this morning.

The Code Black security crash protocol is second nature—once, in the fall, they’d crashed six times in three weeks—and the first thing to go are the computers, frozen to preserve data when the second thing happens: all exterior power is cut.  As soon as the backup generators kick in, the guard at Station One takes the clipboard and checks in with each and every person in the building, using the list. Ink and paper are crash-proof.  Because it's a Saturday, a holiday, and the President is not in residence, the list only has three names on it: Danny, CJ, and Donna.  Morris doesn’t sign in.

“This is for real?”  CJ asks Morris, since, on balance, he might be more trustworthy than CNN.

“Looks like,” the guard confirms grimly.

“Where’s the President?”  is CJ’s next question, as it has to be.

“New Hampshire,”  Donna says, weakly.  She’s dropped into one of the chairs by the door, like her legs won’t hold her up anymore.  “He and Leo and Josh are at the farm house, strategizing for the Paulson Bill…but no one’s supposed to know.”  She looks up.  “Officially, they’re all with family for the holidays.”

There is a moment of silence.  CJ turns and twitches the blind at the window behind her: the view—a corner of the West Lawn, a glimpse of the Reagan Federal Building just beyond—looks exactly the same.  The blast came from the east; this side of the building was relatively shielded. “Now what?”

“The Downstairs Room,”  Morris says, decisively.  He holds up the clipboard: there’s a graphic organizer of some sort…a defense plan, CJ realizes when he passes it to her.  Circles and bubbles and graphs delineating exactly where the White House occupants should go in the event of a terrorist attack in the United States.  CJ finds her name in the circle labeled _West Wing Staff Non-E_.   She’s supposed to go to a bunker underneath the Old Executive Office Building, a Cold War relic that can be reached by an underground corridor—a tunnel, basically, an escape hatch—from the White House.  And then she’s supposed to wait.  For whatever happens next.

CJ had a conversation about this once—with Josh, of all people.  He’d been concerned because the National Security Council had given him a card with instructions for use in the event of a nuclear attack.

“They want me up in the plane, or down in a bunker,” he explained, anxiously.  “And they don’t want you…or Toby, or Sam for that matter.”

The whole conversation had been a non-sequitur; she’d just gone to remind him about a meeting  or something.  Josh had been sitting in the dark of his office, surrounded by paperwork, listening to…Schubert, the _Ave Maria_ —that part, she remembers distinctly. “Have you been upset about this?” she’d asked, disbelieving. So many issues at the time had seemed (and had _been_ ) infinitely more likely to destroy them than a nuclear attack—and of course no one would need a press secretary in the event of a new Cold War. But Josh had been so serious. “I didn’t want to be friends with you,” he'd said, soberly, “and have you not know.” She cannot help but notice that Josh’s name—like Leo’s, like the President’s—does not appear on Morris’s schematic. They’re up in a plane somewhere, or down in a bunker, and non-essential staff like CJ don’t get to see that sort of information.

SIX

Ainsley answers the door wearing a Duke sweatshirt, pajama pants with snowflakes on them, and a miner’s headlamp. “Sam! Oh, my God! Are you all right? You’re bleeding!” she says, all in rapid succession.

“Am _I_ all…? I came to see if _you_ —I am?”

“Come in!  Sit down! Don’t move!”  She hurries him in off the doorstep, deposits him on the loveseat and, before he can say anything, she’s darted away again.  For the first time, Sam notices a rusty bloodstain on the left shoulder of his white shirt, the one he fell asleep wearing, too tired to unpack.  About two inches behind his ear, his fingers encounter a patch of hair matted down with blood.  It starts stinging as soon as he touches it, but up until that moment, he’d been totally unaware of it.  Sam stands up again, thinking vaguely that it would be rude to bleed all over Ainsley’s upholstery.

Dazed, he glances around the room: the soothing pale walls, a few framed photos clustered on the antique mantelpiece, a Christmas tree with old-fashioned ornaments, the tasteful wing chair complimenting the colors of the high-end rag rug on the hardwood floor, a bookshelf with a little Nativity set on the top _._ He can’t bring his mind to fasten on any one thing. It’s hard to believe Ainsley has only lived here four months, but she has.  He’d actually been the one to recommend the Realtor;  you don’t get to rent this close to Dupont Circle unless you know someone who knows someone. That’s how he’d known the address.  That, and the fact that she’d invited the senior staff over for drinks right before Christmas.  (“In appreciation of the kindness which has been shown to me since I began working here, and which I very much appreciate, as I hope I have made clear before now, but if I haven’t or even if I have, I would like to take this opportunity to extend to you an invitation, which I hope you will take as an indication of my wish that you have a pleasant holiday season…”—and, Sam thinks, he and Ainsley will have to chat about the passive voice and the concept of a run-on sentence someday.  Maybe when things aren’t exploding so much).

It had sounded like a terrible idea: Toby, CJ, Josh, Donna, Ginger, Carol, Ed, Larry, a few people from the Counsel’s Office, all sipping eggnog and eating Christmas cookies in Ainsley’s tiny living room.  But—Christmas miracle or Southern hospitality—somehow it hadn’t been awkward at all.  His heart skips and squeezes when he realizes that he’s seen at least one of those people nearly every day for the past fourteen months…and now he doesn’t know where they are, how they are, if he’ll ever see any of them again.

He is determinedly studying the titles in the bookshelf— _To Kill a Mockingbird_ , The Annotated Code of the Commonwealth of Virginia, _Bridget Jones’s Diary_ —when Ainsley returns with a first aid kit and a towel full of ice.

When he’s swallowed down two painkillers and she’s changed into jeans, they find themselves sitting silently across from each other in the living room, a twisted parody of some demented social call.  Sam has only been awake for about two hours, but he cannot remember ever—not in law school, not pulling down eighty hour weeks at Gage Whitney, not on the campaign trail— _ever_ being this exhausted.  He feels oddly detached and, from a great distance, he wonders if this is what it means to be in shock.

“Why the—”  Sam gestures at his forehead to indicate Ainsley’s headlamp.

“What?  Oh!”  Ainsley tugs it off, “I forgot I even had it on.  I was looking through my camping stuff for a lantern.  In case the lights went out.”

“Oh,” Sam says. And then, because social calls demand some excuse, “Your place is the closest.  My phone doesn’t work, and the cellphone satellites are crashed so I just…” he waves at the room, unable to find the words.

“I was eating breakfast,” Ainsley says, non-sequitur, “when it came on the news.  CNN said an explosion, but then I couldn’t get a signal and I heard on the radio that it might be a dirty bomb.  And, and then the radio stopped working.”

“Electromagnetic pulse,” Sam explains.

“Excuse me?”

“Radiation sets off an electromagnetic pulse.  That’s why your radio stopped working. The lights should be okay, unless the power lines come down.”

“Oh…that’s, uh.  That’s good.”

In this surreal conversation, it doesn’t seem strange at all to say, “My radio fell three stories onto Mass Ave., along with the rest of my kitchen.”  So that’s what Sam says.

But now Ainsley is looking at him with an odd expression on her face.  “Sam?”

“Yes?”

“A dirty bomb doesn’t give off radiation.  A _nuclear_ bomb gives off radiation.”

Sam stares at her.  Once, in another lifetime, he read briefs about this, white papers, commission reports.  She’s right. He feels a trickle of cold water from his ice pack melt down his neck.  He doesn’t know he’s speaking until he hears his own voice. “Oh, my God.”

 

FIVE

Maybe it’s because he’s walking by himself, not part of any obvious family or neighborhood group; maybe it’s because he’s not carrying anything, so he’s not blocked by bags or parcels.  For whatever reason, people keep trying to talk to Toby.  In five miles, he’s heard three conspiracy theories and had four separate people inform him that this is the Rapture, the end of the world.  
  
Traffic dies away as more and more people abandon their cars.  Sometimes, Toby finds himself walking against the crowd: people are heading west, not east.  No one else is walking toward Maryland and…eerily, horribly...almost no one is coming south, walking over the border _from_ Maryland, either.  At one point, he finds himself walking right down the middle of Rhode Island Avenue with about seventy other people, only to be overtaken by a flock of boys in bright ski jackets and yarmulkes—a Hebrew-school class, complete with their rabbi.    The boys are no older than twelve and though a few of the younger ones hang close to their teacher, most treat the evacuation like a field trip.   They scamper ahead, calling to each other, jumping out from behind deserted cars to scare their friends. 

“Daniel!  Ari!  Stay where I can see you!” the rabbi calls after two of his charges. He picks up one of the youngest boys, about four, and falls into step with Toby.  “We’ve got to be at least a mile ahead of the rest of the congregation, and still they won’t stop! What we could do if only we had that energy, eh?”  he remarks genially to Toby.  Toby grunts in reply. 

Twenty paces later, the rabbi tries again.  “Of course, my grandfather—Daniel! I won’t say it again!—my grandfather, he walked from Krakow to Sofia when he was about my age.  In the war,” he adds, like Toby might not get the significance.

Toby nodded.  His own grandfather had walked to Vienna from a nameless village in Russia, but he does not particularly feel the need to share that with this young man.

They walk on.  Suddenly, there’s a rumbling sound in the east; the lowering sky glows gray and purple like a bruise lit from within, like lightning but lasting for at least five minutes.  Everyone on the road stops and looks up, a crazy, post-apocalyptic _tableau vivant_. 

“Have you ever heard,” the young rabbi stands with his head tipped back, sounding awed, “of the Baal Shem Tov?” 

“What?”  Toby has trouble pulling his gaze from the sky.

“The Baal Shem Tov…the founder of Hassidic Judaism.”

“What about him?”  Toby asks.  His feet hurt, his knees are sore, he has a stitch in his side.  It is possible that the sky is falling. He will not be responsible for his actions if this young man tries to spin him a story about how a fifteenth-century mystic predicted exactly this.   

“He was very famous,” the rabbi says, still looking at the clouds, almost talking to himself. “And one day, a pilgrim came to him and asked,  ‘Learned one, I say my prayers and make my tithe and honor the commandments.  I keep kosher and keep the Sabbath and help those in need.  What else can I do?’ The Baal Shem Tov looked at him and, the story tells us, _his fingers become as candles.  And he says to the young pilgrim, why not be turned totally into fire?”_

FOUR

If Sam’s kitchen is a disaster area, Ainsley’s looks like an abandoned refugee camp, as furnished by Eddie Bauer. There are stacks of clothing and camping gear and bottles of water spread out on every surface.  
  
“What is all this for?” Sam asks when he follows her in to get rid of his melting ice-pack.

“If there’s a lot of radiation, the water supply will be contaminated,”  Ainsley explains.  She’s stashing supplies in a backpack.  When that is filled, she starts putting bottles into a giant Prada tote bag. 

“No, I mean, now that you have all of this…what are you going to do?  Where are you going to go?”

“Sam.”  Ainsley looks at him, a little worried, like maybe he’s hit his head harder than she’d suspected.   “Sam, there’s been an attack on my country.  Someone has obliterated a mid-sized city.  They may have used a thermonuclear _weapon_.  Supply lines and communication are totally disrupted.  Transportation is a nightmare.  No one knows where the President is, or who is in charge, or what is going to happen next.” She zips up the $1500 designer bag and slings it on her shoulder.  “So I’m going to work, Sam.  I’m going to the White House.  What else am I going to do?”

THREE

Andy lives just on the other side of the Maryland/DC border, as close to Washington as she can get without actually leaving the Free State.  Other Representatives keep a house in their registered district for PR purposes and live in apartments—often really nice apartments—in the District, but Andy has never even considered that.  He remembers getting stuck at a fundraising dinner with a real estate booster who kept urging her to buy in Washington. “Oh, I could never live in DC,” Andy had said sweetly, “taxation without representation, you know.” 

Toby’s so busy remembering things like that, he almost misses her—and that will keep him up at night, if he ever sleeps again.  He hikes miles through a flood of refugees into an apocalyptic wasteland, and two blocks from her house, he almost walks right past her. 

“I was _on my way_!”  he insists at the same moment that she begins, “I waited as long as I could, but…” That is obviously not true, and Toby’s about to say as much when he realizes that they’ve been in each other’s company for five seconds, and the world is ending, and they’re about to launch into a full-scale argument. 

“What happened?”  he says, instead, and they sit down on the curb, because ten minutes can’t possibly make a difference now. 

Andy folds her hands—he can’t keep his eyes from her ring finger.  “Someone set off a nuclear bomb in Baltimore.”

Toby suspects it’s the closeness that comes from being married—though he’s never been married to anyone else, so he doesn’t know—but he can skip the platitudes with Andy.  He doesn’t have to say, “how terrible!”  or “oh, no!”  He can move right to the important questions: “How bad?” 

“Well, the bomb went off on the ground, not in the air like, I don’t know, Hiroshima,” Andy waves a hand,  like she can’t even grasp the comparison, “So the city is—well, it’s _not_ , anymore.  It’s totally vaporized.  And because Baltimore was right on the Chesapeake, there’s a big chunk of the interior Atlantic shelf that’s destabilized.  It sounds like a lot of the Eastern Shore has been swamped.  There may be tsunami.  The governor had emergency messages going out by phone and radio for awhile, but I haven’t heard anything in a few hours.”

Toby has only been to Annapolis—the capitol of Maryland, the seat of the Governor’s mansion—once or twice, but he can imagine what a tsunami would do to that small, low-lying colonial city.  He knows Baltimore better, though, because Baltimore has—had?—a beaux-arts train station on the commuter train line from New York to Washington.  He and Andy had met at that station, by his count, 63 times in the two years before they decided they were officially engaged.  She’d been an assistant district attorney, a member of the Governor’s Council on Educational Reform, working her way up quickly behind the scenes; he’d been a professional political operative, moving from campaign to campaign.   She’d meet him at track 8, where the AMTRAC from Union Station stopped at 6: 32PM, and they’d eat dinner and argue politics at a restaurant in Little Italy or one of the small German delis in Highlandtown.  None of those places exist anymore. Of course, Toby realizes, neither does their marriage.

“Okay,” Toby says at last, standing up, “let’s go.”  He half-expects Andy to object, but she doesn’t, of course.  She was on her way when he got here.  She’s always been a politician who values honor over sentiment: she’ll support something for exactly as long as it is feasible.  And then she’ll let it go.  She has never in her life worked on a losing campaign.

“I can’t believe you walked all this way.  We’ll take my car,” is all she says.

TWO

Sam and Ainsley walk through the Metro tunnels, because the wind that blew out Sam’s window seems to have returned with a vengeance.  It’s full of blinding grit. Ainsley explains, as they walk, that a bomb detonated on or near the ground would create a huge crater.  If that bomb were nuclear, the resulting fall-out would be impregnated with radioactive material. She knows because she read a briefing paper about it, once.  Sam imagines them breathing in tiny, glowing bits of Charm City.  When they stumble down the frozen escalators into the Dupont Circle Metro Station, two blocks from Ainsley’s house, he actually misses the stinging gusts.   Without them, everything is too quiet. The trains are not running, of course, and most people have hurried west-ward, trying to outrun the dark wind, but there are a few places where people have set up camp on train platforms, bringing radios and blankets.  Tube stations served as fall-out shelters during the Battle of Britain, one such refugee explains when Sam and Ainsley stop at the Metro Center platform.   (The man who tells them this was a professor at Georgetown, _before_ —and it’s clear, from the way he says ‘before’ that he knows that life is over now.  It’s only been about eight hours since the detonation).

Sam will share that bit of wisdom with CJ and Donna and Morris, once he and Ainsley are ushered a mile under the OEOB and into a concrete room full of MREs and wilderness supplies.  FEMA and the Red Cross have stocked the Downstairs Room to maintain livability standards for at least 100 Federal employees for a week.  Turns out he and Ainsley shouldn’t have bothered hauling bottled water through the DC Metro system.  Supplies for 100 people, but because the attack happened early on a Saturday right after a holiday, there are only five people to take advantage of it: Donna, CJ, Morris, Sam, and Ainsley.  Donna whispers to him that, originally, there had been a sixth person: Danny.  “Danny Concannon?”  Sam whispers back, because it’s a no-news Saturday and he can’t imagine what a journalist would be doing at the White House until CJ glances over at them and Donna elbows him.  Oh.  Oh!  That’s why Danny…

“Where is he now?”  Sam mutters, unpacking Ainsley’s backpack and adding her organic granola bars to the stacks of MREs provided by FEMA. 

“He left.”

“What do you mean, he left?  There’s nothing but nuclear fallout out there!”

Donna shrugs.  “He said he had to go look for the story.”

“And you just let him go?”  Sam hisses, disbelieving,  “Donna—Baltimore is gone!  Washington is deserted! Who is he going to interview?!”

“CJ thinks he’ll come back.  That’s why Morris was upstairs to let you in.  We’re taking shifts.”

Donna had started at Bartlet for America answering phones, but by election night, she was a manager of volunteers…and now Sam knows why.  Not only are there shifts to monitor the first floor of the OEOB—just in case someone needs to get in (and wasn’t that lucky for Sam and Ainsley?)—there’s a separate 24-hour rota for listening to the radio that someone from the Red Cross had stashed with the emergency supplies.

For two days, the radio broadcasts static.  On the evening of the first day, CJ returns from her shift upstairs with Toby and Andy in tow.  At the end of the world, it seems, West Wing staff just want to go to work. 

Halfway through the second day, Morris fails to return from his shift upstairs.  Sam and Toby go up to look for him, not quite sure what they’ll find.  They’re pretty sure that being on surface level is not enough to really contaminate anyone, but, really, they don’t know.  All they have to go on are half-remembered emergency briefings and a book of instructions packed with the MREs:  _Nuclear War Survival Skills,_ copyright 1987.  The foreword, written by Edward Teller, advises them that, unlike Soviet policy, “American official policy is based on the assumption that civil defense is useless.”  It’s not a very encouraging book.  

The first floor is empty and very, very cold.  The OEOB houses the White House Office of Administration—or, at least, it used to—and the desks are full of family photos and post-its and brand new calendars, turned optimistically to January before their owners left for the holidays.  The front door is closed but unlocked and, neatly folded next to it, they find the silvery emergency blanket that Morris had worn when he’d left the Downstairs Room. 

“Maybe he went home,”  Sam says at last. 

“Sure,”  Toby agrees, “maybe.” 

They take the blanket with them, back to the Downstairs Room with its electric heaters and the hurricane lanterns and _Nuclear War Survival Skills._

On the first day, destruction.  And Sam and Ainsley, Toby and Andy.  On the third day, Morris leaves.  On the evening of that third day, during Donna’s second radio shift, she thinks she hears something.  But when she hushes them, there is just more white noise. 

“Sorry.  I really thought I…”

“Do you want me to take a turn?”  Sam offers.  “Too long and you start hearing things; we should switch.”

“No, it’s fine.  I—”

“Shh!  No, I hear it, too!”  CJ crouches next to the radio.  “Not talking; though, it’s, like…chimes?”

Faintly, faintly, through the static…

“Oh.  Oh!”  Toby says. He looks around the room, his eyes shining in the artificial lamplight.  “It’s six o’clock.”

The other stare back at him. “Eleven, London time,”  he explains shakily.

“Oh, God,” Sam whispers, because after four years, he can almost read Toby’s mind and he’s never seen the man this close to tears. “It’s the BBC.”

And it is.

ONE

They continue to get radio broadcasts—fuzzy, irregular, seemingly out of sequence—and they piece together the story.  A nuclear bomb on the Mid-Atlantic coast: no one will ever know the epicenter, but probably close to Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

“Bridges and tunnels,” Sam says quietly, the first time they get confirmation of what they've suspected. “It was probably a car bomb, right near the 395 turn-off.   North to New York, South to DC.”  He has always had a freakish knowledge of geography but, for once, Toby doesn't comment on it.  
  
A second bomb, they hear, took out most of lower New York. (“I saw that,”  Toby whispers. “It was changed totally into fire.”) Three different organizations, including one based in Northern Iowa, claim responsibility; one implies that there are additional targets.  There are rumors of a bomb intended for Boston.  Riots and evacuations across New England; no one has heard from the President.  The BBC expert, in his calm Received English, suggests that the Baltimore bomb was destined for Washington, that it was supposed to go off a day later, on Sunday, the first Sunday of the new year.  A panel of experts quarrel over the possible religious significance until the signal shifts and there is only static. 

“It went off early?!”  Donna was astonished.  “What, did they put a _kitchen timer_ on a thermonuclear _bomb_?”

“No one knows how many nuclear warheads were in the Soviet Union when it collapsed,” Toby rubs his head wearily. “Certainly no one’s been keeping track of them since, much less making sure they’re in good working order.”

“Russia is a long way from Baltimore,” snaps CJ.

Toby sighs, “It _is_ a long way.  And if you’re guarding some thirty-year-old-arms dump in outer Mongolia, hundreds of miles away from everyone you know—including a government agency that hasn’t paid you in months… Someone offers you more money than you’ve ever seen to look the other way while something goes missing?  How far away does Baltimore seem then?”

“And by _go missing_ …you mean, missing right over the border into Kazakhstan?!”

“Don’t yell at _me_ , CJ.  To say the borders of  former Soviet republics leak like sieves is insulting to sieves. And I didn’t write the legislation that mandates checks for only 1% of foreign shipping containers—“

“If that remark was intended toward me,”  Ainsley cuts in, “I’d just like to remind you all—“

“Stop!”   Donna stands up.  “God! I’m sorry I even asked!”  She paces to the door, stepping over a pallet of rations; when she reaches the wall, she turns around and walks back.  Four walls, six people. There’s nowhere else to go.  “I have got to get out of here,”  she mutters, half to herself. 

“Yes,”  Andy says suddenly.

“What?”

The Representative—are you still a Representative if vast portions of your state no longer exist?—is hauling herself to her feet.  “Let’s get out of here.”

As soon as she hears Andy actually say it, Donna realizes what a ridiculous idea it is.  “We can’t.  We don’t even know if it’s safe out there.  I mean, we know it’s probably _not_ safe out there…”

“I—don’t care.  I can’t… We can’t stay in here.”

“Ms. Wyatt,”  Ainsley tries, “There’s nothing out there.” 

“We don’t know that,”  Sam says, standing himself.  “I mean, maybe everyone’s evacuated, maybe there’s nothing left…but maybe there is.  There were people in the Metro stations, five days ago. And if there is—anything, anyone—they’re going to be out _there_ , not in here.  So we should be out there, too.”

“Look, let’s just think about this rationally,”  CJ starts.

“I could go out and check,”  Donna offers, because it's not possible that everyone out there is just... _gone_.  The President is out there, somewhere, and Danny.  Her parents, her cousin Janine in Madison.  Josh.  “Just to see.  Maybe, you know, maybe people are looking for us.”

“So you’d go out there and…what? Then you’ll be contaminated…if you ever come back,”   Toby growls.  “Be serious!  And Andy, you can’t just—“

“We can’t refuse to let her back in!”   CJ turns on Toby.

“Of course we can’t!  Which means she has to stay.  You,”   Toby turns to his ex-wife, “you and Donna have to stay.  Or.  Or…”

“Or we all have to go,”  Sam finishes the thought.  

They are all on their feet now.  Some obscure instinct, born from years in various legislative bodies, reminds them that this is how people present ideas, in Congress, at press conferences, to peers and constituents: a person stands up.

“So,” Ainsley says,  “now what?  What’s next?”

“Now.”  Toby takes a deep breath before he replies: “Now, we decide what we're going to do.  First, we take a vote.”

THE BEGINNING


End file.
